Poetry is Life and Death
Emily Wilson channels centuries of oral tradition at the International Poetry Forum.
Emily Wilson delivered a "poetry reading" in Pittsburgh last month. I put poetry reading in quotes because to call that evening a mere poetry reading would be like shoving loose chunks of Homer through Google Translate and calling it an act of translation. Anyone can read a poem. But who can attract a crowd of over a thousand, stun them to silence for over an hour, and forcefully reanimate the corpse of a dead language? Emily Wilson can.
You may recognize Wilson's name from recent online discourse. Her 2017 translation of The Odyssey is a strong contender as source material for the recently announced Christopher Nolan film adaptation. The direct language of her translation upset some online detractors. Read all about it if you want—I'd rather tell you exactly how it felt to hear out loud.
On Dec. 13, 2024, the bare stage of the Carnegie Music Hall reverberated with verse as Wilson took to the podium. The evening unfolded as a traditional reading: Wilson described the piece she was reading—in this case Ancient Greek excerpts followed by her own English translation—and spoke on its themes and form. Wilson fused dramatic declamation with anecdote and insight in the tradition of performance-lecture. The context Wilson provided around the choice of each excerpt revealed an intensely personal connection between performer and material.
Wilson shared over a dozen excerpts from her translations, repeatedly returning to recognition scenes. She not only shared scenes from The Odyssey—where recognition and reunion figure as prominent themes—but teased out patterns of recognition across Oedipus Tyrranus, The Illiad, and her own original poetry. An ice cube slipped down my spine when she shared an excerpt from Book XXII of The Iliad telling of a break in the violence. Wilson explained how this moment served as a way for enemies to "pause and share their grief before the fighting continues."
Wilson identified three layers of recognition in this excerpt: First, Priam and Achilles recognize a mirror of their grief in their enemy. Second, Achilles also recognizes his own mortality. He welcomes the old father Priam in the recognition that his own father, Peleus, will never see him again, as Achilles knows he will die in Troy. The final recognition is the recognition that loss is universal.
"All we can hope to share in the brief time we have alive is moments like this,” Wilson said to preface the excerpt, “of human connection through shared grief, shared food, shared stories."
As she read, I followed the beat of each moment of recognition in the text. The words peeled open layer upon layer of feeling deep in my chest. One line in particular hit me like a freight train: "When Priam came in unnoticed, he stood near Achilles, and touched his knees, and kissed his hands / The terrible, murderous hands, which killed so many sons." Grief over personal loss intertwined with my grief over global loss during this cold, long, war-stricken winter.
My tears flowed freely as she shared the final two poems, both original works. She shared that she lost her mother, a Shakespeare scholar, two years prior after a painful struggle with Alzheimer's in a care home. Long after her mother lost the ability to speak she would still respond when hearing Shakespearean sonnets aloud. The sound of poetry was meaningful to her, even when she didn't remember that she had once known the poems by heart.
Like Odysseus's dog, like Priam to Achilles, I was flooded with recognition. My grandmother is battling Alzheimer's, and has lost the ability to speak English altogether. I was never taught to speak her native language, Hindi, beyond a few key phrases—mostly affectionate terms, cooking terms, and different little phrases telling me to be quiet or to hurry up. To continue to reach the part of her that recognizes me requires an immense act of translation on my part. Repetition, gesture, emphasis, and metrical form are not superfluous poetic devices—they are my desperate, last ditch efforts to create meaning. They are tools I wield with all my might in hopes a small sliver of recognition will gleam behind her eyes. Wilson was a mirror to my own grief.
Wilson shared her final work of the evening—an original poem written during a difficult period in her life. The advancing illness of her mother occurred simultaneously to a mental health crisis in one of her children. The short poem pleads to Hades to take her mother, and to spare her daughter. This poem was so personal, so perfect, it feels wrong to copy down here. I hope she publishes it one day, but I scribbled through my tears in fear she wouldn't.
What a rare feeling, that something so ephemeral can carry such weight that I immediately felt compelled to record it, even if the recording is imperfect. That's how the first Greek layabouts listening to Homer recounting his stories aloud must have felt. That's how the King's men must have felt cobbling together crappy quartos. Writing it down will not capture the feeling of hearing it aloud, but is a necessary act of translation to keep a tradition alive. Anyone can read a poem. But we are so rarely tasked to remember one.
